Savoring the past: Ivan days collection of culinary antiques

If the past is indeed a foreign country where they do things differently, then the historian may be regarded as a kind of tourist. Just as the food of a different country can make us vividly aware of its strangeness, so its cuisine--not just what was eaten, but how it was prepared and served--provides a powerful impression of just how much the past differs from the present. Cooking, one of the most ephemeral of arts, leaves so few traces that historians have only recently begun to investigate it seriously. Some analyze the earliest cook-book for clues about the kinds of foods that were eaten and when certain tastes and techniques entered a cuisine, while those with an interest in objects investigate material from both archaeological sites and surviving kitchens to understand earlier eating and cooking practices. (1)

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Combining the methods of both an tiquarian and anthropologist, Ivan Day has made a specialty of investigating not only what was done in the past, but also how. In more populist parlance he is like a crime scene investigator sifting for clues. "Some food was edible sculpture," he says. "And none of it survives. It decomposed or melted into sugar syrup long ago. So, we have to search for the forensic evidence elsewhere."

Indeed, Day has made himself an expert in translating the vague language of old recipes into actual practice, and of deciphering the complex diagrams in old gastronomic texts to create both the highly wrought individual dishes and extravagant table settings of earlier centuries (see Figs. la--lh). It is his ever-expanding collection of antique tools and ancient texts that makes this possible. He recalls ducking into an antiquarian bookshop at age thirteen to get out of a downpour. To avoid being shooed back outside by the Dickensian proprietor, he picked up the first book at hand, which happened to be the Cook's and Confectioner's Dictionary by one John Nott. "It was published in 1723. I was so determined to be taken seriously by this imperious man that I bought it. I took it home and became fascinated. I taught myself to cook out of it. A couple of months later, I went back and asked to look at more. That started everything off."

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Some years later, Day's graduate work in botany at the University of Athens was cut short by the Turkish invasion of Cyprus. Instead of returning to England, he took a small house on Crete. "It had a seventeenth-century kitchen with a huge wood-burning stove. I suddenly had the will, the time, and the means of cooking food as they had done in the past. The thing that was missing from my experience up to that point was an open fire and original cookery equipment. I realized that if I was going to do these recipes and really get inside them, then I'd have to do them using the techniques of the period." Soon Day was scouring antiques shops and markets looking for any enigmatic objects that resembled the utensils illustrated in the books he was also buying. Now the collection numbers in the thousands of objects and, after a recent culling, some eight hundred antiquarian texts (as well as some more modern ones). (2) His passionate scholarly pursuits even determined the house, a seventeenth-century farmhouse in the Lake District, that has been his home for the past twenty years (see Fig. 7). "From the time I owned the house on Crete, I had one stipulation about any house: It had to have a working fireplace that I could cook in."

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Though full of beautiful objects, Day's collection is no mere assemblage of decorative gadgetry. Each thing is called into use--often. He has created historically accurate food and settings for a number of great English houses, including Chatsworth and Waddesdon Manor, and museums in both the United States and Europe. Most recently, in New York City last winter he re-created for the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture, an eighteenth-century table setting for the exhibition Fragile Diplomacy: Meissen Porcelain for European Courts, ca. 1710-63. Utilizing actual pieces from the 1744-1745 Saint Andrew's porcelain dessert service made by Meissen and now in the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, he mixed porcelain plates and figures with sugar-work sculptures of a classical temple and baskets filled with flowers within a miniature garden parterre delineated with colored sugar. (3)

While Day is an expert in all kinds of cookery practices from the medieval period through the nineteenth century, his passion is truly fired in creating these elaborate eighteenth-century dessert settings. "I love eighteenth-century food," he says. "Historians often say that the palate wasn't that sophisticated, but I have to disagree. Just thing of the eighteenth-century. You have the finest furniture ever made. You have exquisite clothing made from the finest silks. Manners and etiquette were elevated to the highest level of refinement ever seen. The silver and porcelain that survives from that time are some of the most beautiful objects in the history of art. There is no way that such a discerning, cultivated civilization--and I mean all across Europe, not just in one country--would have settled for anything less than the best meats, pastries, and ice creams on their tables."